Strange as it might seem, when I was pregnant with my twin
sons, I had a recurring dream about World War I. I believe it
was due to something every parent discovers: With the birth of
children comes the fear that you won't be able to protect them
from the dangers of life.

When our eldest, a daughter, was born, I worried about crime.
Before she was old enough to sit up, I plotted how to prevent
her from ever walking alone in a dark parking lot. With boys,
my thoughts turned to war.

The nine million men killed in World War I - 5.4 million for
the allies and 4 million for the Central Powers1
- all had mothers. But even the most devoted of these moms couldn't
protect their boys from mistakes by politicians and military leaders
who made that war excessively bloody by failing to adapt to then-new
military technologies.2

Today some politicians are making this same mistake: Planning
to refight the last war instead of preparing for the next one.
They don't really understand that war with 21st Century weapons
will be fundamentally different than past wars have been. That's
the basic factor holding back a missile defense system. Forget
talk about budgets, or how well a missile defense system would
work. A possibly catastrophic failure to think ahead is the main
reason we don't have a full missile defense program in place today.

The stakes are enormous. In a major war, a missile defense
system most likely would be the only thing preventing the deaths
of hundreds of millions of civilians.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, few people believed that
air travel was possible. Some children born then grew up to die
in air battles.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, a defense expert, believes missile
defenses will be to the 21st Century military what air power was
to the first half of the 20th.3

Technology moves much faster now than it did 100 years ago,
but politicians haven't changed at all. Missile defense systems
would deter war; yet, they'll save lives if war comes. Morally,
they're the best military expenditure ever. But politicians aren't
building them largely because they've never built them before.

Critics of missile defense say the systems may not work (although
many experts disagree). But people once said that about airplanes.
Science advances fast. A defense against nuclear weapons is
the natural next step after the development of the weapons themselves,
just as anti-aircraft weapons followed the development of airplanes
dropping bombs.

I doubt I'm the only mother who worries about war. In a January
2001 McLaughlin & Associates poll, 72% of women said they
favored building a missile defense system. That's slightly more
support than can be found among men, although missile defense
systems are popular. Over 80% of Republicans and almost two-thirds
of Democrats and Independents want such a system. 70% of African-Americans
want it, as do 58.1% of self-described "liberals" -
usually the last people to support any kind of new defense expenditure.4

Even the Europeans and the Russians - who have had their own
rudimentary missile defense system since at least 1968 - are warming
to the idea.5

Throughout all of human history, mankind has never learned
to avoid war. It could be fatally foolish of us to assume we've
suddenly learned.

In reference to World War I, Artist Max Slevogt painted "The
Mothers," an "endless column of wailing women alongside
an endless ditch of dead men."6 Without
a missile defense system, the column of the dead will be even
longer after a future war. But the column of mothers will be
shorter, because the mothers will be dead, too.